Transformed by tragedy

For some, a changed life from the day American life changed

A year ago on this day, Americans came under the worst terrorist attack ever on U.S. soil.

We trembled. We wept.

And then, some of us began to figure out what was important in our lives and to take action. To give of ourselves and to find ourselves.

Here are some of those stories.

He left New York to be closer to family

Aaron Adams usually rode a train each morning into the station under the World Trade Center.

Thankfully, Adams' schedule at the uptown restaurant where he cooked had just changed. On the morning of Sept. 11, he slept in his Jersey City apartment across the river from New York City.

Two sounds soon woke him -- the ringing of the phone as his frantic mother tried to reach him, and the blaring of sirens, seemingly everywhere.

And Adams' life suddenly, drastically, refocused.

The burly, tattooed 27-year-old lived a fast-paced single's life in the big city, working 12-hour shifts and then enjoying New York's night scene.

"I'd been away from my home and my family since age 18," Adams said. "I went off to seek my fortune."

Now, he wondered what he was doing so far away from his family. Adams' father and brother were in California, his mother, Lin, in Jacksonville.

Adams and a roommate walked the streets Sept. 11 because they couldn't get to their jobs in New York. They were certain a war on American soil was starting. And they worried that terrorists had released a biological weapon.

"It was chilling," he said. "We could smell the burning. ... I kind of shuddered and cried a lot."

By the time he returned to work two days later, Adams had made up his mind: He would leave New York in January.

Adams and the restaurant's crew busied themselves making food for the rescue workers. Sometimes he called his brother in California and just sobbed, or walked along the streets taking pictures of the missing-person posters that plastered New York businesses.

"I didn't want to forget that these were individuals lost in the building," Adams said, flipping through a stack of his photographs.

And the young man who used to call his mom once a month started talking with her nearly every day.

Lin Adams was relocating her interior design business in September. The building she had just purchased in Ortega had extra space. Come to Jacksonville, she suggested to her son. Open your own restaurant.

Adams, with his new perspective on life, jumped at the chance to do something he'd only dreamed about.

His mother was surprised that he said yes.

"I think he, like a lot of people, had to re-evaluate what is important to him," Lin Adams said. "I urge everybody to do that. Whether it's a natural disaster or a terrorist attack, it shouldn't take that to bring families together."

Today Adams lives in Riverside and is preparing to open a bistro called The Village Store.

"It's taking a risk to take what little money I have and get a loan and open my own restaurant," he said as he supervised renovations. "But we can all go at any time. I just might as well take a shot at it."

STILL HELPING OTHERS: Angela Elliot prepares Dale Upchurch for blood donation while his son James, 17, waits. "We don't get a lot of family time because we all work," James Upchurch said. "We come together on this day."

-- Crista Jeremiason/staff

They understood loss and decided to help

Sue and Dale Upchurch and their children know what it feels like to lose a loved one suddenly and tragically.

Melanie, Sue's daughter and Dale's stepdaughter, committed suicide five years ago. She was 17.

"The loss of a child is one of the hardest things a family can endure," said Dale.

Melanie shot herself. She lived for 10 days, but doctors couldn't save her. Her family made something good come of the tragedy by donating Melanie's organs and tissues to ill people.

When the Upchurches, who live in northwest St. Johns County, heard about the terrorist attacks, they felt a close bond with the families. They knew how much blood doctors had used trying to save Melanie. And they wanted to make something good come from another tragedy.

So they joined the hundreds of people lined up at the Florida Georgia Blood Alliance's Mandarin donation center -- only to be asked to go home and return another day. Too many people were trying to give blood at the same time, a worker told them.

"I was so angry at her," Dale Upchurch recalled. "I'd never given blood, and I didn't understand the process, and I felt like they didn't want it."

But the worker called the Upchurches at home and explained the blood center was overwhelmed with the response, and that blood was an ongoing need.

The Upchurches and their sons, Dale Jr. and James, decided to donate regularly. In the beginning, James was too young to donate, but he went along with his family. He made his first donation the day after his 17th birthday.

The family celebrates after each donation session by sharing a nice meal.

"I think it's great, because we don't get a lot of family time because we all work," James Upchurch said recently as he lay in a recliner, donating at the center. "We come together on this day."

Dale Jr., 18, just went to boot camp, but already his parents have inquired about him donating there.

Sue Upchurch said her heart broke when a TV show recently featured children who lost a parent in the attacks.

"This is their first anniversary," she said.

"We understand. It's hard."

Couple remembers tragedy's gay victims

Michael Lombardi-Nash and his partner of 30 years, Paul Nash, felt the same need to help.

But though the gay Arlington couple are HIV negative, they -- like all homosexuals -- are banned from giving blood.

So they donated money to help the victims' families. And as they heard about the heroics of some openly gay terrorist victims, Lombardi-Nash started collecting snippets of information about gay and lesbian victims to create an Internet tribute page. They attached the page, at www.angelfire.com/fl3/uraniamanuscripts/sept11.html, to a site they had already created for a 19th-century gay rights activist.

The most famous victims on the site are Mark Bingham and New York City Fire Department Chaplain Mychal Judge.

Mark Bingham was widely lauded as one of the passengers who fought hijackers on United Airlines Flight 93, which crashed in a Pennsylvania field. Officials think the hijackers intended to crash the plane into the White House or the Capitol.

Judge, an openly gay Catholic priest, died ministering to an injured firefighter. In June, President Bush signed the Mychal Judge Act, which grants federal money to victims' same-sex partners.

Other victims on their site aren't widely known, such as Wesley Mercer, the World Trade Center security supervisor who evacuated all 3,700 of his company's employees, then headed back to the tower's 44th floor for one last check and was never seen again.

The site is a way to grieve but also a way to counter new hurts, such as the Rev. Jerry Falwell's charge soon after the attacks that ''abortionists, feminists, gays and lesbians'' were responsible.

"Every time I heard this negative stuff, that's what made me do more and more research," Lombardi-Nash said.

"It was like the deaths of the gay people meant nothing, and gays were being blamed," Nash said. "But then, with Bingham and Judge, you see they're just as much heroes as anyone else."

They figure as many as 300 gay and lesbian people died in the attacks, based on estimates that up to 10 percent of the population is homosexual. The site has had about 31,000 visitors from all over the world -- some praising it, others attacking it for singling out gays. But the couple note other memorials have focused only on people of a certain ethnic group or occupation.

"If we don't do it, who's gonna do it?" Nash said.

STRETCHING HER LIMITS: Kelly Fisher leads a yoga class at the studio the former Navy chief opened in the Murray Hill area. After Sept. 11, she said, "I think I found an increased sense of urgency in finding some meaning and direction in my life."

-- Crista Jeremiason/staff

In yoga, she found direction for her life

A few years ago, Kelly Fisher was a tough Navy chief. But today she's projecting a different image of herself, as a serene yoga instructor.

"I wish I could see my old Navy buddies' faces if they could see what I'm doing now," said Fisher, who retired from the Navy in 1999.

After she left the Navy, she headed back to school for her MBA. She then tried a variety of jobs, but nothing seemed to click for her. She didn't want to join the corporate world.

And after Sept. 11, Fisher said, "I think I found an increased sense of urgency in finding some meaning and direction in my life."

In May, she enrolled in a five-week program to immerse herself in intensive yoga training. She'd been a student of the fitness technique for 15 years and had taught it to some others.

Fisher thinks the meditative aspect of yoga helped her deal with the attacks a little better than some of her friends. So did her experience living in London, where bomb alerts frequently clear the streets.

"Some of my friends had trouble sleeping at night" after the attacks, she said. "They were upset, angry and scared, and not knowing what to do about it."

When Fisher saw an available storefront in the Murray Hill area, she took a financial risk, and within two days had made the commitment to open her own yoga studio.

"I thought it would be nice to bring out that center of calmness and connection in other people," Fisher said. "It was like now or never."

She's living on the financial edge, for sure.

But Fisher, now looking through the prism of Sept. 11, says life is full of risks.

"I'd rather pursue my own path and bring a little bit of joy or peace to someone else, instead of going for that economic security."

LOOKING WITHIN: Barbara Hubbard reads over some of her poetry. "Now I feel like a whole person," she said. "I feel like I had to face it, seeing the bravery of the people on TV."

-- Bob Self/Staff

Poetry helped her face feelings, past

Realtor Barbara Lovelace Hubbard was watching a work crew repair the siding on a house for a client when she found out about the attacks.

Soon, she and the men were standing together with tears in their eyes.

Hubbard's eyes didn't dry for days. And she tried two things she'd never done before -- writing poems and facing her past.

Every morning, she felt compelled to curl up on the couch of her Atlantic Beach home, or walk out on the sand at the ocean, pull out a composition book and write down her feelings. Hubbard said the poems "came to her," poems about patriotism and pain, fear and hope. Poems like America's Tear, in which she wrote:

I hear America crying

Let America be America again

Where in every heart

A hero dwells

Soon the subjects of her poems shifted to herself and her own personal tragedy. From the rubble of Sept. 11, Hubbard pulled the hero within herself.

When Hubbard was 6, her father, and then her mother, then her grandmother died. She and three siblings were separated, sent to live in different places.

"I lost my whole family," she said.

Hubbard had tried to put the wound behind her long ago, living each day anew. She avoided the funerals of relatives. But because of Sept. 11, she made herself think back to those days and put her pain into words.

"It's so amazing to me that that pocket of my life was left unfinished," Hubbard reflected. "Now I feel like a whole person. I feel like I had to face it, seeing the bravery of the people on TV." Her children have seen some of the poems about her childhood, but she admits they are painful.

She writes two or three poems a week, nearly 140 so far.

And she has moved on. She now writes "about the wonderful things" -- poems of bliss, of adventure, of imagination.

"Now," she said, "I have made peace with the past."

Marcia Mattson can be reached at (904) 359-4073 or at mmattsonjacksonville.com.